First meet-up event of Belarus Azure User Group

On July, 22 2015 we've held the first meet-up event of Belarus Azure User Group where we shared experience building solution on Microsoft Azure, using various services and migrating existing solutions to the cloud. It was a special event for me because I was on stage speaking this time.

I was talking about Azure Search, the service that I've been learning recently. It was a 'getting to know' kind of session with lots of demos. My goal was to show people what's possible with the current version of the service and how they do regular things like provisioning and creating various service objects in an automated way, how to implement common functionality that one would expect to see on a search page and how different language analyzers improve user experience with full text search. The scripts and demo app can be found on GitHub.

Alexander Laysha was talking about best practices to create scalable and resilient web applications on Azure. He covered a lot of topics like designing stateless web tiers, distributed caching and state management, static content handling, asynchronous programming and offloading work to web jobs, throttling and so on and on. You can check out his slides at Prezi.

Dzmitry Durasau was sharing his experience migrating a large enterprise solution to the cloud. This time he was showing how they migrated file storage subsystem using IAAS approach, how they insured fault-tolerance and high availability, how they took advantage of top D-series machines with huge SSD drives and storage infrastructure of Windows Server 2012 R2 that used to be available in super expensive enterprise storage solutions and now is available out of the box with this server OS.